Yesterday, the Shrike paid me a visit in Boulder. That’s Cooper hanging out in the backyard with his new friend. Now, before you go all serious movie history on me, I know it looks like a predator. But it is the closest sculpture to a Shrike that I’ve been able to find. So, even if it’s a predator, I’m going to call him Shrike. If you happen to know of an artist that has done a life size Shrike sculpture, please hook me up as now that I’ve managed to convince Amy to let me have one Shrike in my backyard, I’m pretty confident that I can get another one approved by my art procurement committee.

The movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap is being screened at the Boulder Theater on Friday, March 4th at 10:00 am followed by a Global Town Hall at eTown at 1pm to discuss the movie. Amy and I are sponsoring the event along with NCWIT – please join in for what I expect will be an awesome documentary and lively discussion.

My friends at Oblong have been involved in some very cool new installations of their Mezzanine product in different vertical markets. They are suddenly seeing a lot of interest from hospitals and health care systems. A recent new installation is the Mercy Virtual Care Center, which is the world’s first virtual care center. If you are at HIMSS this week in Las Vegas, go visit Oblong at booth #10725 on the show floor and see the future of collaboration in action.

The following is a guest post by Bill Douglas about divorce and the entrepreneur. I got divorced when I was 24 years old while running my first company. I was fortunate that I didn’t have any kids so it was more like a nasty breakup after a long relationship, but the added complexity of marriage, family linkages, and all the emotional stuff surrounding it was one of the big (but not the only) input into the multi-year depressive episode I had.

My mother-in-law (Amy’s mom) passed away last Sunday. The funeral was in Hotchkiss, Colorado yesterday. At lunch with her extended family, someone said something that stuck with me. “No one gets out of this alive.” I went looking for the source this morning and couldn’t find one. Amy thought it was Woody Allen, a Google search turned up Jim Morrison (due to the name of his book), Robert Heinlein was cited as saying something similar, but in the end I decided it didn’t matter. I just liked the statement.

The retrades have begun. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve experienced four retrades – two early stage, one growth, and one late stage – and I’ve heard of a number of others. If you’ve never experienced a retrade, or don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the situation when you have a firm deal agreed upon or a term sheet signed and are proceeding to closing a deal, when the investor (or acquirer) decides to change the terms of the deal. And, in case you were wondering, it’s always to make the terms worse, not better.

Last week New York was the third state to create a program – called the International Innovators Initiative (IN2NYC) – based on the construct of the Global Entrepreneur in Residence program. This is a New York City based program created by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and the City University of New York (CUNY). IN2NYC is by far the most ambition program to date. It will help up to 80 selected entrepreneurs gain access to the visas they need to grow their businesses in New York City and is projected to create more than 700 jobs for New Yorkers in the first three years.

I received plenty of interesting feedback on my post titled Sources of Insecurities. A good friend and one of our investors, Jamey Sperans, even put together a slide trying to process the concept. If you were interested in the original post, I expect it’ll be fun to ponder Jamey’s slide on a Sunday morning. Sperans View on Feld’s Post about Sources of Insecurities from Brad Feld

Yesterday I wrote about getting stuck in an hour long reading loop on the Apple / FBI situation. As much as I didn’t want it to happen again today, it did. More on that in a minute. But first, I want to encourage you to go watch the movie Race which is the story of Jesse Owens and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was superb and the double entendre of the title played out for a full two hours as the movie made us think hard about race in America in the 1930s and what was happening in Nazi Germany at the same time. I also thought the acting by the primary characters, including Stephan James (Jesse Owens), Jason Sudeikis (Larry Sanders – Owens coach), and Barnaby Metschurat (Joseph Goebbels – Nazi propaganda minister) was incredible. Metschurat was a special bonus – he brought an extremely uncomfortable feeling of deep menace to every scene he is in.